Tom Toles for April 30, 2013

Maybe we should raise taxes AGAIN?

Barry’s Smaller Paychecks Initiative has worked wonders.

The slime trail goes all the way back to the House of Representatives and Senate.disgustedly,(at legislators)C.

Bullseye! Austerity failed Japan and the EU. Both are waking up. Japan is changing policies. EU admits “austerity has reached its limit” but will it wait a decade to change?

austerity doesn’t work. the economic theory that conservatives cite is extremely flawed. narrowly avoided triple dip recession for britain(.6% growth), 25% unemployment for spain, greece is much worse.

Keep signing Free Trade Agreements and this is the result: no economic growth what-so-ever. No country in the world has exported their manufacturing and survived as a country.

“Conservatives have Alway been against Deficits”Why are they responsible for most of our national debt?Why did they turn a surplus into a deficit?

It will take at least a generation to overcome the devastation of the Bush economy. And that’s only if no republican gets elected president . GOP simply cannot manage the national economy. They fail repeatedly. The tremendous irony is that the right wing are such sheeple they believe it when Fox ‘news’ blames the democrats.

thank you paul krugman so rickapolis you think bho is a gop er national debt up [years 1952-2012] approx 4800+ billion during 36 gop potus and up 6400+ billion during 23 year of democrat potus

Yes, but the President has veto power over anything Congress passes and I never said anything about Presidents, you did.

But given the history of the last forty years, they love them when they are in power.

What a concept.

Here, all those people are considered to be gold bricking deadbeats, undeserving of any social support.

Check the actual history of that, onguard.

Yes, Congress has the control over the money. Now go and look at the records of all those years when the Republicans had control, and do the math.

When Reagan was elected, and the ‘new’ thing was the voodoo trickle down economics which was going to fix everything that was wrong in the country, there were actually a lot of people who predicted economic disaster. Not enough of them, obviously, given where we are now. Those people have mostly died out, but they were the people who had a good education and were literate, even if they were HS dropouts.

The population struggling with these issues today didn’t have the benefit of that education. Our schools have been turned into propaganda machines, producing semi literates, many of whom are emotionally damaged by the anti-social aspects of ‘peer socialization’, which is no socialization at all. They entirely lack critical thinking skills, and are often limited as to basic math skills.

Some of you might be interested in watching the Charlotte Iserbyt interviews. She was interviewed after retirement, and after the publication of a book on the same subject:

http://tinyurl.com/bvs42h2

wisconsin instituted austerity. went from 11th in job creation to 44th.

The GOP congress would do NOTHING if it didn’t benefit the 1% or more, the .01%.Some politicians care about the average, every joe people.

I bought a Ford Escort years ago. Tucked in the glove box was the color code, IN SPANISH!

Define “American”. We praise GM and Ford for making and selling overseas, but denigrate Toyota, Nissan, Honda for making and selling overseas (here!) Funny how no one ever mentions VW or Mercedes in this debate.

I don’t know that they are so very different than the EU, where they mostly have good family and health care.

Even in the EU, they still have close, functional families. Here, Government intrusion (and the economy) has made it very difficult to have a family life at all.

I agree that there are other cultural differences in Japan, but how much that factor drives the way they run the economy is a question in my mind. I’d say they have a deeper commitment to family and to a functional society than we have in the West, but in terms of government social support, I don’t know that they are much different than the EU.

Certainly things are very different here than most other First World countries … and even second tier countries in a lot of cases. We have devolved into full blown fascism, and until we face that, I don’t suppose anything will change much.

In fairness, they are government lies.

As long as no sympathy can be garnered for the homeless, nothing will be done to change anything. The government works pretty hard (and wastes our tax dollars) in making sure as many people as possible believe that poverty equals deadbeat, no qualifications.

A substantial percentage of the homeless are mentally ill, and an equally substantial percentage were put on the streets when they couldn’t pay their medical bills. In my state, some of those people are working, often more than one job, but they can’t get far enough ahead to afford shelter.

I don’t understand how people can believe that it’s OK to work to put money in someone else’s pocket, without being able to cover your own needs.

There are addicts and alcoholics, of course, as well as the simply discouraged, and there are vets.

Most of those people deserve not only our sympathy, but our support. Even if you discount rummies and addicts, they are the smallest percentage, a percentage of the impaired and inept that any country can expect. Particularly in a free country, you can’t get rid of them all. Despite the claims of Big Pharma, you can’t cure everything.

But real jobs, real education, practical health care – all those things could put us back on a functional track. They would cost money, of course.

End the war on drugs, and finance a New Beginning …

@Ms. Ima

Checked on where there parts were manufactured lately ..?

Just askin’